“I’ve become unreasonably attached with the only metric for my success that I have access to: my Amazon rank.”
That plaintive and familiar admission comes from author Emily Wenstrom in a recent bit of commentary at The Write Life about how hard it is to sense her level of success when sales reports come from her publisher only quarterly and then “about two months following the end of the quarter.” Clearly, this is the kind of Old World pattern that we wish publishers would rectify: it’s impossible to ask authors to be more engaged in their own marketing while giving those authors no idea of how to assess their effectiveness. Some publishers are stepping right up with author dashboards and much faster (if not real-time) data on sales; some have yet to see the light.
But with Amazon rankings having the perfectly understandable fascination they have for authors, especially with the dearth of other data, we were interested in a look at them by another author: Dan Koboldt, who is also a scientist. While his work at The Genome Institute in St. Louis isn’t in the same field as Amazon author-ranking algorithms, a scientific head is always welcome in literature and publishing.
Koboldt orchestrated “a coordinated buy” of his book The Rogue Retrieval from Harper Voyager Impulse in mid-May. By targeting a purchase from some fifty people at the same time on the same day, he wanted to learn how soon he might see some reflection of the sales in his ranking, what change that might be, and what the effect on subcategory rankings would be.
His rank climbed eventually from around 145,000 up to 4,748, with about fifty-seven people making their buys. “It might surprise some that so many sales only propelled my book to #5,000,” he writes, “but this speaks to the size of the Amazon bookstore. If we assume it ranks 1 million books (an underestimate), this ranking is in the top 0.5 percent.” In his three key subcategories, Koboldt reached number twenty-four in Time Travel, number twenty-nine in Time Travel Kindle titles, and number fifty in Technothrillers, the last of which is extremely competitive, as he notes.
As for a halo effect, it took about four days, Koboldt reports, for the effects of the one-day buy to wear off. At this writing, we see the book resting at about 158,000.
Koboldt offers four summary points:
- “The lag time between sales and ranking is around eight hours.
- “The Sales Rank benefit from a major spike carries over one to two days.
- “Fifty sales in a single day can propel a book to #5,000 in the Kindle Store.
- “It’s possible to reach good category ranks (top thirty) with such a strategy.”
Bottom line: While we hardly recommend becoming obsessed with your rankings, we also understand. After all, we live in a time of “the quantified self,” as Richard Nash and others put it, from our Fitbits to our Twitter Analytics, and almost any metric can mesmerize. There’s also an irresistible urge to learn more about how Amazon’s vast systems work (or don’t) for authors, readers, and publishers. Probably Koboldt’s most helpful comment has to do with the vastness of the sea in which authors swim at Amazon: with so much content pouring into the system daily, it’s a heavy lift for anyone to move the needle.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
